Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 155:618 (Apr 1998)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

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BSac 155:618 (Apr 98) p. 234

Book Reviews

By the Faculty of Dallas Theological Seminary

Lin M. Williams, Editor

God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict. By Gregory A. Boyd. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997. 414 pp. $17.99.

This book by Boyd, professor of theology at Bethel College, is destined to be both influential and controversial. The book is driven by a concern for what may be the most significant theological issue of this century—the problem of evil—and it brings careful, nonanecdotal scholarship to one of evangelicalism’s most sensational topics—spiritual warfare. However, because he addresses these issues from the perspective of free-will theism, Boyd is prevented from offering consistent hope for the future or significant meaning in the midst of suffering. In other words he compounds the problems he seeks to resolve.

Every Christian apologist would like a simple, palatable response to the problem of evil. Theists are often asked to explain how horrific experiences can take place in a world governed by divine providence, and they have responded with careful answers that uphold both the goodness and the omnipotence of God. Though Boyd plans to follow this book with another which will address that problem even more directly, he believes the whole conversation has been misguided. Such questions would never have come up, he argues, had it not been for Augustine’s influential view of divine sovereignty, according to which the will of God cannot be thwarted. This belief has been foundational to Western theology, and Boyd believes it has caused Christians for the last fifteen hundred years to misunderstand biblical teaching about the nature of God, the work of Christ, the purpose of the church, and the place of suffering.

Boyd’s own approach to the issue is decidedly nontraditional. He argues that the Bible was written from the perspective of a “warfare worldview.” As he describes it, this worldview “is predicated on the assumption that divine goodness does not completely control or in any sense will evil; rather, good and evil are at war with one another. This assumption obviously entails that God is not now exercising exhaustive, meticulous control over the world. In this worldview, God must work with, and battle against, other created beings. While none of these beings can ever match God’s own power, each has some degree of genuine influence within the cosmos. In other words, a warfare worldview is inherently pluralistic. There is no single, all-determinative divine will that coercively steers all things, and hence there is here no supposition that evil agents and events have a secret divine motive behind them. Hence too, one need not agonize over what ultimately good, transcendent divine purpose might be serv...

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